When I first read St. Therese of Lisieux’s “Story of a Soul,” I was not impressed. In fact, I found “the Little Flower” to be more than a little obnoxious.

In particular, I couldn’t stand Therese’s tendency to read into everyday affairs the action and involvement of God, such as her observation that nature tended to mirror her emotions at the most important moments of her life. As she put it, “When I wept the sky wept with me, and when I was happy the sun shone without a cloud in the sky.”

When I first read this passage, I chalked Therese’s meteorological interpretation up to self-aggrandizement and delusion. But as my own spiritual life began to deepen, I began to understand the passage differently. Therese’s belief that even the weather exercised some of God’s providential care for her wasn’t the product of self-importance; it was reflective of a well and deeply formed Catholic imagination. Whether or not her imagination accurately portrayed what was happening with the weather in this instance, by seeing God’s love in all things, it helped Therese to be more truly orientated toward reality.

Therese’s witness highlights an important fact: When it comes to living the Catholic faith, including its difficult moral teachings and its mysterious dogmas, pure reason is not enough. We need the imagination.

Imagining is not about inventing something that isn’t there. Instead, it’s about using a God-given intellectual power to “see” what isn’t immediately visible, but is truly present. Rather than being a generator of fictitious flights of fancy, the imagination is a muscle that helps us to see reality as it really is. It helps provide us with what Servant of God Luigi Giussani calls “a unitary mentality,” “a conception of God as pertinent to all aspects of life, underlying every human experience, excluding none.”

Furthermore, by vividly connecting what’s happening in front of us with the deeper mysteries of our faith, the imagination is compelling. St. John Henry Newman knew this when he wrote that “the heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination.” The English saint observed that the imagination has the capacity to stimulate action in a way that pure intellect doesn’t.

Therefore, exercising our imagination isn’t trivial or an “add-on” ability. It’s how God made us: as imaginative creatures.

We imagine, for instance, when we “see” Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary become present to us at the Eucharist. Exercising this ability can foster greater interior devotion and allows us to receive the sacrament with our hearts more truthfully aligned to reality. In other words, it is easier to believe and act as if the Eucharist is what we know it is — the Body of Christ — when our imagination helps.

This also is the case in the moral life. Giving to the poor we encounter in downtown Minneapolis becomes that much easier when our imagination allows us to “see” Christ in them. Embracing the Church’s teaching about sexuality becomes possible when our imagination helps us imbue sexual relations with the wonder and mystery that truly define them, helping to convince us of sex’s cosmic significance as a participation in God’s creative act and an imitation of his covenantal love.

Although most of the moral precepts of the Church are defensible according to reason, I’m increasingly convinced that many of us cannot live them well without a vivid Catholic imagination. The problem is that the “unitary mentality” that Giussani spoke of has been largely unraveled in modern times. Catholic morality may exist in a box in our head, but it doesn’t easily connect to lived reality. We struggle to see “God in all things” — in the poor, in our sexual relations, in everything.

Newman observed that “many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.” If he’s correct, we’d do well to reflect on how we can deepen the Catholic imagination in our own homes and communities, so it can help us embrace the truths of our faith as not mere conclusions, but vivid expressions of reality.

Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.